Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Right now, the British weekly music press--New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker (MM)--is
going through one of its periodic phases of feeling self-important.
The reason, of course, is Britpop. The weeklies didn't create the
movement, but they did name it, and for two years now they've given
Britpop their unconditional support. The official line is that 'we've
never had it so good' (an echo of a famous political slogan from the
'60s); that Britpop is a golden age for UK music, and that if you want
to keep tabs on this fast-moving scene, you've got to buy the weeklies.

Grunge wasn't a bad time for the UK music press (in fact Melody Maker
was way ahead of American publications in picking up on what was happening in
Seattle). But the Brit-press is happiest when it can cover stuff happening
on
its own doorstep, on a week-by-week basis. If a band is local, it's so
much easier to kickstart the hype-cycle that so appals Americans: the
group's discovery at a live gig by a cub reporter ('I have seen the
future'), its endorsement by a more established writer, the granting of
'Single of the Week' honors, the pricking of major label A&R
interest, the full-page debut album rave, the front cover, and so forth.
So accelerated is the hype-cycle these days that stages are often
skipped; buzz bands sometimes make the front cover before they've even released a
record.

Being so USA-based, grunge interfered with this process. NME and MM rely on record companies to pay for trips outside the UK, which
means that most American bands are already signed by the time the press
write about it. Grunge also goaded the Britpress' patriotic pride,
triggering its reflex-resentment towards America's domination of pop culture. After
an initial anti-grunge backlash in '93 (Suede's defiantly Anglophile
blend of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey),Britpop really got rollin' in
'94. There was the neo-Merseybeat swagger of Oasis, Blur's unexpected
self-resurrection out of the 'has been/never-was' dumpster, and Pulp's
strange and wonderful ascent to cult popularity, after 15 years in the
wilderness. In '95, Britpop went into overdrive: Elastica, Supergrass,
Bluetones, Cast, Gene, Shed Seven, Menswear, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

The
Britpress will seize on any excuse for a fit of chest-swelling,
tub-thumping jingoism. Britpop was ideal, since its aesthetic base--the
mid-60's, filtered through its late '70s echo, New Wave--had hitherto
been strictly an indie style, and thus the province of the weeklies. At
the same time, Britpop bands are overtly anti-experimental and
pre-psychedelic; they combine a playsafe 1966-meets-1978, three minute
pop aesthetic with a doctrine of stardom-at-all-costs, making them
highly desirable to record companies and extremely radio-friendly.
Because the bands it deals with now hit the charts,
the prestige
and morale of the Britpress has been boosted; for the first time in 15
years, people turn to them as tipsheets on future stars. For instance,
this January a grubby little gang of sub-Oasis oiks called Northern
Uproar appeared on MM's cover one week, and on Top Of the Pops the next (TOTP
being the UK's premiere pop TV show, based around that week's new chart
entries). Furthermore, Britpoppers behave like pop stars; they make
strenuous efforts to give good face and good quote, all of which makes the music papers' job much easier.

That
job is basically to convince the readers that stuff is happening. Now,
you might think that ain't so hard, given the plethora of scenes and
sounds generated
by the merry postmodern tumult of the 1990's. But the Britpress
readership is deeply conservative, and its idea of what's relevant
is decidedly narrow. Look at the NME and MM annual readers polls in the last 15years and you'll invariably find the Best Band position occupied by
a white, all-male, British guitar band: the Jam, Echo & the
Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, Oasis. The Top 10
Band, Album and Single categories usually feature no women, no blacks,
no dance music, and rarely any Yanks (although REM and Nirvana did
briefly challenge the Anglocentric bias).

The Britpress
has to give its readers what they want, i.e as many pieces as possible
on the 10 or so Big Brits (pegged around the single, the album, the
tour,
any excuse whatsoever basically), plus features on Brit-pop
'contenders'--younger bands waiting in the wings for fame and fortune to
take its toll on the established Brit biggies. That still leaves a
fair number of pages which have to be be filled by token coverage of
'minority' interests like techno, hip hop, weird guitar experimentalism,
American rock, and other stuff which market research shows the readers
are simply not interested in.

The big problem for the
weekly music papers right now is that the very commercial success that's
vindicated their Britpop boosterism is also making their own role
redundant. A few years ago, NME started its Brat Awards as a
sort of parody-cum-riposte to the Brit Awards (the UK record industry's
official, Grammy-like honors). In the beginning, NME could
justifiably argue that the truly vibrant pop of the day was being
ignored by the Brits, in favor of MOR artistes like Elton John and Phil
Collins, whose
awards were basically rewards for their contribution, via international
sales, towards rectifying Britain's trade deficit. These days, both
Brits and Brats are alarmingly similar in their fixation on the
triumvirate of Blur/Oasis/Pulp; yesterday's alternative has become
today's mainstream.

Because of this, everybody is writing about Britpop--from the newspapers and tabloids to glossy teenybop mags like Smash Hits.
With their traditional turf usurped by other mags and by TV, the
weeklies don't know where to go next, how to reclaim their unique role.
Do they carry on
scrabbling
to find the next Blur or Oasis ahead of the slower-moving monthly
magazines, a strategy which is already dredging up lame xeroxes and
runts-of-the-litter like Northern Uproar? Or do they dare to drift
left-field, and discover/dream up a new alternative?

Another
reason why the weekly papers have been obliged to narrow their focus is
the vast range of music media now available in the U.K., from
specialist publications (dance mags like Mixmag and Muzik, metal mags like Kerrang, cutting edge eclectics like The Wire) to the 'general interest' music monthlies like Select, Q and Mojo. The last three are owned by the publishing group EMAP, and are designed to take the reader from cradle to grave: Select is targetted at indie-loving teens and colledge kids, Q is for late twenty-to early thirtysomethings who buy maybe ten CD's a year, while Mojo is
a largely retro-oriented magazine aimed at the 30-plus market who've
given up on 'modern music' but are still passionately interested in the
graying rock'n'rollers who soundtracked their youth.

NME and Melody Maker are
deadly rivals, which is odd because they're owned by the same media
conglomerate, IPC, and are situated just one floor apart inside IPC's
King's Reach Tower.
Once upon a time, this emnity was based on
ideological differences. Today, the rivalry is sustained out of habit
more than anything; Britpop unites all in its engulfing mediocrity. In
truth, the papers have a complementary relationship. Since the late
'80s, MM has been ensconced in the role of discovering new bands first; the bigger-selling NME
bides its time and usually reaps the benefits of timing its coverage
closer to the point at which bands break into the mainstream.

Writing for a weekly music paper offers writers cachet and power, but
little financial reward or career prospects. There's a constant influx
of firebrands who arrive, make their mark (usually by crusading on
behalf of a particular scene or genre) and then burn out. There's a
definite type that's attracted to the weekly music press: almost always
male, almost always middle class, over-educated, a bit emotionally retarded. (I speak as someone who's written for Melody Maker for
ten years, and certainly don't exempt myself from this description!).
The Fall's Mark E. Smith tagged this breed with his phrase 'hip
priest'. Throbbing with will-to-belief and gifted in the arts of
messianic
rhetoric, these angsty young men gravitate towards the
music press, where in previous generations they might have chosen
revolutionary politics, poetry or evangelism.

See,
thriving (as opposed to eking out a living) in the Britpress requires a
weird sort of doublethink: the knack of participating in the conscious
construction
of a 'happening scene', while simultaneously believing in the reality
and righteousness of the figment you've created. A good example of this
syndrome is Romo, the pipe-dream of two of Melody Maker's brightest
journos,Simon Price and Taylor Parkes. Short for 'Romantic Modernism',
Romo is not, the duo stress, merely a revival of early '80s New
Romantic synth-and-eyeliner
pop, but "a renaissance" of the quintessentially English aptitude for
artifice and androgny. No matter that the one Romo band I've seen so
far, Viva, were quite dreadful, a cut-price Roxy Music; Price &
Taylor's manifesto-mongering and sheer will to hallucinate into being an
alternative to the increasingly prosaic Britpop are admirable. It's
what the English music press does best, and doesn't do often enough
these days.

British music hacks engage in this kind of scene-making partly for
glory, partly out of dissatisfaction with pop's stasis quo, and partly
in a purely generous attempt to make things seem more exciting than they
actually are. Ideas are thrown down, as a challenge and a
reproach, and in the hope that someone will pick up the baton. There's
no profit to be had from these crusades; only the bands who get signed
by majors thanks to the hacks's efforts, and the A&R scouts who
do the signing, make any money out of the hype-cycle.

The weekly nature of the Britpress, the sheer number of pages that
require filling, and the swarm of young egos hungry to make their
mark--all this contributes to the infamous "hothouse atmosphere" of the
UK music scene: the rapid turnover of scenes and styles, the histrionics and overheated prose.
The
readers don't particularly like these qualities, but they kinda expect
them; they're locked in a peculiar love/hate relationship with the
weeklies, and tend both to overestimate and underestimate their power. NME and MM
can't break bands on their own, without radio play, nor can they
significantly damage successful bands. But the papers do have a huge
influence on the record companies' A&R policy (several Romo
combos have already been signed!),
and a more subliminal effect on
British music culture itself. By creating a critical climate in which
certain ideas and attributes become highly charged, sexy, de rigeur, the
music papers shape the aesthetic universe in which a young band
develops; by the time they're getting written about, the bands are
spouting the buzzwords, dropping the references, reciting the litany.
Dreampop, the post-My Bloody Valentine wave of Lush, Slowdive, Ride,
etc, is a good example of this syndrome.

In the end, the Britpress's virtues are the same as its vices. It
is volatile, venomous, fickle, pretentious, lacking in perspective,
frothy with premature exaltations and disproportionate fervour, absurdly
polarised in its judgements, prey to the most pernicious kinds of
boosterism, and an utter stranger to fact-checking. Wholly un-American,
in other words.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

'Britpop'--just in case you've been in a coma for the last year--is the music papers' buzzterm for an alleged rejuvenation of the charts, with the likes of Oasis, Blur, Elastica, Pulp and Supergrass displacing American grunge/faceless rave/super-annuated AOR in the higher reaches
of the Hit Parade. 'Britpop' has become a rallying cry, an excuse for chests to swell with patriotic pride. It's even made the tabloids and the News At Ten. Back in August a cabbie told me he'd only ever bought four records in his entire life, then--unprompted--brought up Blur and Oasis.
Even he'd heard about their big battle over whose single would enter the charts at Number One.

So everybody--industry, media, 'the kids'--is frothing with excitement about Britpop. Why? The music biz, which was having trouble building long-selling careers off the back
of dance music and had lost ground to the post-rave indie labels, is thrilled because the Britpopsters are guitar-based bands who willingly constrain themselves within the 3-minute
pop single format and radio-friendly, trebley production. The music press is buzzing 'cos Britpop's aesthetic base-- the mid-Sixties, filtered through its late '70s echo, New Wave--had hitherto been strictly an indie style, and thus the inkies' province. At the same time, the bands are overtly
anti-experimental and pre-psychedelic; they combine playsafe 1966-meets-1978 aesthetics with an almost doctrinal ethos of ambition and stardom-at-all-costs. Because the bands it
discovers now hit the charts, the music press' prestige and morale has been boosted; for the first time in years, people turn to the inkies as tipsheets! Moreover, Britpopsters behave like stars, make
an effort to give good face and good copy, and this makes the journos' job easier. And 'the kids'? Even the youngest surely sense, on some subliminal level, that the sound of
Britpop harks back to the days when Britannia ruled the pop waves, while the attitude evokes an era when being young was a real cool time. The glory-lust of Oasis' "Champagne Supernova",
the insouciance of Supergrass' "Alright", seem mighty appealing, even as they fly flagrantly in the face of the socio-economic facts.

As it happens, I think Britain IS the place to be, pop-wise; it's just that this state-of-affairs has NOTHING to do with Britpop. Relatively unheralded by the media, another
generation of Britons are waiving the rules. There's the post-rock experimentalism of Laika, Pram, Techno-Animal etc; the trip hop of Tricky, Wagon Christ and the Mo'Wax label;
the 'artcore' jungle of 4 Hero, Dillinja, Droppin' Science, the Moving Shadow label; the art-tekno weirdness of Aphex Twin, Bedouin Ascent, et al. All these strands of UK activity are either offshoots of, or deeply influenced by, club music and sound-system culture; sonically, they're informed
by the rhythm-science and studio-magick of dub reggae, hip hop and techno. And all speak eloquently if non-verbally of the emergence of a new hyrid British identity, a mongrel,
mutational mix of black and white.

Britpop is an evasion of the multiracial, technology-mediated nature of UK pop culture in the '90s. If it started a few years ago as a revolt against American grunge (Suede's fey fusion of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey), now it's extended itself into the symbolic erasure of Black Britain,
as manifested in jungle and trip hop. For Britpopsters, the Sixties figure as a 'lost golden age' in a way that's alarmingly analogous to the mythic stature of the Empire vis-a-vis football hooligans and the BNP. Even more than the insularity of Britpop's quintessentially English canon (Kinks, Jam, Small
Faces, Buzzcocks, Beatles, Smiths, Madness), it's the sheer WHITENESS of its sound that is staggering. Take Elastica, whose singer Justine Frischmann confessed that she could only
think of one form of black music she liked: ska (the jerkiest, most New Wavey form of black pop ever!). And take Blur, whose homage to the U.K's music-hall pop tradition
manages to sever The Kinks from R&B, Madness from ska, and Ian Dury from the Blockheads' fluency in funk and disco.

Damon Albarn's pseudo-yob accent testifies to a nostalgia for a lost white ethnicity, one that's fast eroding under the triple attrition of America, Europe and this nation's indigenous non-white population. Like his hero Martin Amis, Albarn fetishises London's vestigial remnants of
authentic white trash as "the last truly English people you will ever know" (to borrow a lyric from Morrissey, another feller with a dubious penchant for skinheads and villains).
Mozzer is right, this is a dying breed, already displaced by a new generation of London youth who speak an alloy of Cockney/Jamaican patois/B-boy slang, watch American sci-fi
movies, grapple with Japanese computer games, and listen to sampler-based music like jungle.

It's these kids--the kind you'll find at drum & bass hang-outs like Speed and AWOL--who are today's mods, not the sorry-ass mod revivalists at Camden's Blow Up club. Mod
originally meant 'modernist', meant having utterly contemporary tastes in music, clothes, everything. Today's junglists, trip-hoppers and techno-heads share their '60s ancestors obsession with records (the obscurest track, the freshest import) as opposed to bands; the same orientation
towards Black America and Jamaica; the same anticipation for the future. Camden is supposed to have brought back the idea of Swinging London, but for five years now pirate radio has
been making a clandestine cartography of the metropolis, bringing the scent of enchantment to forsaken places like Peckham and Dalston, as MC's chant out the listeners' paged-
in "big shouts" and "'nuff respects".

Perhaps even more than race, it's covert class struggle that underpins the Britpop phenom: the fetishising by mostly middle class bands and fans of a British working class
culture that's already largely disappeared, is really a means of evading the real nature of modern prole leisure, which remains overwhelmingly shaped by rave. Blow Up's avowed anti-Ecstasy stance symbolises this perfectly. Not only did E usher in a new and still unfolding era of psychedelic music
based around the drugs/technology interface, but the drug also permanently altered the mentality of vast tranches of da youth, blasting away reserve, inhibition, emotional
constipation, everything in the English character that holds us back. E and rave transformed the UK into one funky nation, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from Britpop. From Blur's rickety arrangements to the raunch-less turgidity of Oasis, Britpop is rhythmically retarded, to say the least.
Partly, it's the result of cultural inbreeding, of a white pop tradition that's long since distanced itself from the R&B roots that made the Beatles and Stones dance bands; partly, it's a
deliberate avoidance of anything that smacks of lumpen rave.

Thanks to rave, the most vital sectors of '90's UK subculture are all about mixing it up: socially, racially, and musically (DJ cut'n'mix, remixology's deconstructive assault on the song). Returning to the 3 minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking a parochial England
with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly to the future. Here's hoping the future will respond in kind, and remember Britpop only as an aberrant, anachronistic fad--like trad jazz, the early '60s student craze that resurrected the Dixieland sound of 30 years earlier. Perhaps
Oasis will one day seem as inexplicable as Humphrey Lyttleton!

Where Blur's The Great Escape and Oasis' What's The Story) Morning Glory bask in the setting sun of England's bygone pop glory, Tricky's Maxinquaye and Goldie's Timeless gaze into the future. Both Tricky and Goldie are black British B-boys mindwarped by the drugs/technology
interface; both share a strikingly similar set of miscegenated influences ranging from art-rock (David Sylvian, Kate Bush) to ambient (Eno) to the black avant-garde (Public Enemy, Miles Davis); both made the Top 5 of the Album Chart. Reflecting what is really going on in Britain in 1995,Maxinquaye and Timeless offer two versions of a modern inner city blues. Dark, discomfiting, devoid of the callow cheer of yer Blurs and yer Supergrasses, yet it's these records (and, believe me, a horde of other trip hop, jungle and post-rock releases) that are the real reasons to be
cheerful about British popular music in 1995.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

The Brit Box: UK Indie, Shoegaze, And Brit-Pop Gems of the Last
MilleniumDirectors Cut version, Salon.com December 8th, 2007

by Simon Reynolds

The Brit Box comes
cutely packaged. Exploiting the long rectangular cardboard case, the front
shows a red telephone box of the kind you’ve seen in countless old movies set
in England. Flitch a little switch on the box’s backside (which depicts an old
fashioned rotary phone) and a light goes on in the phone box on the front, just
like real ones do at dusk. But this one flashes like a lightshow at a rock gig.

Of course, in the UK, the classic public phone box--sombre scarlet paint, eight
glass window panels on three sides, Her Majesty’s crown insignia at the
top--was long ago replaced with a sleeker, modern-looking model. Rather than
the garish stickers for Britpop groups that plaster Rhino’s phone box, you’ll
find equally lurid cards from hookers advertising all manner of kinky services.
Besides which, everybody in the UK uses cellphones now. But the out-of-date
packaging suits The Brit Box’s sales
pitch to a tee. The idea here is that Great Britain is quaint but classy. Just as Fortnum &
Mason continues to offer afternoon tea even though that
scones-and-cucumber-sandwiches custom has completely died out among the
populace at large, British bands can always be relied on to serve up the country’s
traditional pop values-- wordsmith wit, shapely tunes, English charm--just like
they did back in those fab gear 1960s.

In America, this shtick appeals to the same sort of Anglophiles who fasten on Masterpiece Theater and PBS’s
other imported programming as the seal of quality (even though the dowdy
costume dramas, lame sitcoms and sleuth shows about crime-solving antique
dealers and spinsters barely qualify as middlebrow in their homeland). It’s the
exact same demographic (college-educated upper middle class), just a younger
subset, and an identical syndrome: the equation of England with a superior
level of refinement and literacy.

Being into music from the UK has long been a way for a certain kind of young
American to express their sense of being different from everybody else. The
seeds of this dissident taste might germinate with hearing Depeche Mode or
Morrissey on a modern rock station, then bloom through discovering of college
radio and being initiated in Anglo esoterica like XTC or Robyn Hitchcock, and
finally blossom when the budding Anglophile starts picking up pricey import
copies of British pop papers. The English weekly music papers--nowadays there’s
only NME left, but
in the Eighties and Nineties there was also Melody
Maker and Sounds--have
long inducted Anglophile neophytes into a fabulous world where bands talk
better (reared on the music papers, they know how to give good interview) and
look better (UK groups often have a pulled-together, collective image) than
their American indie equivalents. Just as they manage to be glamorous without
being glitzy in a mainstream Billboard way, the music of the Brit-bands
likewise offers a winning combination of ‘alternative’ and pure pop appeal. The
guitar/bass/drums sound connotes indie and “real music”, but English bands tend
to have a sharper knack for concision and melodic punch, perhaps because their
singles actually have a shot at making the UK Top Forty.

There’s a sexual component to rock Anglophilia too. The British groups usually
contain at least one or two pretty boys--pale, thin, with really good hair;
some will even use eyeliner. Anglo androgyny appeals to young women who like
their pop fantasy object to be sensitive and delicate--unmanly, as opposed to a
buff hunk. But this willowy, tousled look also appeals to a certain kind of gay
taste. Over the years I’ve noticed that even UK frontmen who are considered
macho louts in their homeland seem to have an aura of androgyny by association.
There’s a sense in which England as a whole codes “gay”--too complex a syndrome
to explore here, but it has something to do with Oscar Wilde, Britain’s private
boarding school system, and the glam tradition that encompasses everyone from
Bowie to Boy George to Morrissey.

Targeted at this country’s niche audience of Anglophiles, The Brit Box’s timespan--it
starts in 1984, ends in 1999--seems somewhat arbitrary. What actually
distinguishes those sixteen year as a separate period from the epoch of British
guitar-based music that preceded it? Perhaps it’s simply the fact that,
notwithstanding its appeal to a compact cult following in this country, almost
all of the music on this box failed commercially in America. From the early
Sixties to the early Eighties, what was big in Britain was, with a precious few
exceptions, equally big in America: Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Cream,
Sabbath, Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, David Bowie… The Trans-Atlantic traffic
faltered slightly circa punk, but resumed in force with The Police and The
Clash. Then came all the synth-wielding, MTV-friendly androgynes of the early
80s, the so-called Second British Invasion. Conversely, with a few exceptions
like The Cure and Oasis, what this Rhino box documents is the British Non-Invasion.

Of course, the Brit Box doesn’t
attempt to encompass all the music that came out of the UK between 1984 and
1999. Plenty of English acts enjoyed substantial success in the United States.
Tellingly, though, almost all of them--from George Michael to Soul II Soul,
Simply Red to Stereo MCs and EMF--were deeply steeped in Black American music.
Essentially, they represented the continuation of what the British Invaders of
the Sixties started, the great English love affair with cutting edge black
music: back then, blues and soul; by the Eighties and Nineties, funk, disco,
hip hop, house. However much they expanded and mutated their black sources,
every major group of the British Sixties was at heart a dance band, with years
of hard graft under their collective belt, playing in sweaty clubs to teenagers
looking to shake their stuff. Fetishising the guitar sound of the Sixties
rather than its rhythmic base, British indie rockers ignored the processes and
practices that actually made the British beat group boom happen--its rhythmic
base and impulse toward sonic hybridity. If you're going to be retro, you might
as well at least take everything that's good about the vintage style you're
pillaging, surely? But not only did most British indie rockers of the 80s and
90s fail to adequately replicate the rhythmic dynamism of their Sixties
sources,which was grounded in rhythm-and-blues, they also shied away from
infusing their music with the energy and innovation of contemporary black
music. If “UK indie, Shoegaze, Britpop”, as Rhino’s box characterizes its
contents in the subtitle, proved unable to match in America its chart success
at home, could that be precisely because of its divorce from black music and
the dance imperative? That seems more plausible than the Anglophile fan
argument that would attribute it to defective popular taste or the conservatism
of American radio.

The Smiths, who kick off The
Brit Box with their 1984 song “How Soon Is Now”, were a critical
force in the drift away from the dance floor and black influences. Morrissey’s
voice sounded “pale” and “pure” in a way that was almost but not quite folky;
Johnny Marr’s guitar harked back to Byrdsy jangle rather than Chic’s choppy
funk. In 1986, The Smiths spelled out their opposition to mainstream dance-pop
with their single “Panic”, whose chorus demanded “burn down the disco/hang the
blessed deejay.” In Morrissey’s fantasy tribunal of popular justice, the crime
was lyrical vapidity and complacent hedonism: “the music that they constantly
play/says nothing to me about my life”.. Morrissey’s interview comments of the
time--he described hip hop’s presence in the charts as “a stench”, dismissed
reggae as “vile” and derided R&B’s gross caricature of sexuality--prompted
some critical supporters of soul music and club culture to argue that his
remarks exposed a subtle form of racism in the indie music scene. Bizarrely,
this ancient controversy flared back into life last month when Morrissey,
interviewed by NME,
blamed the erosion and erasure of the England he knew and loved as a child in
the Sixties on immigration, even using the classic nativist metaphor of a
culture being “swamped”. During the resulting furore, which included a
follow-up interview and lawyer’s letters, Morrissey insisted on his opposition to racism, which he described as
“silly”.

This apparent contradiction of being anti-racist but steadfastedly avoiding any
contact with black music culture is integral to indie rock. The Smiths did in
fact play a Rock Against Racism benefit in
1986 not
long after “Panic” was released. Indeed it could be that indie-rock fans, with
their high quotient of college students, are more likely to have progressive
political opinions than regular folks. But those liberal values do not stretch
to a form of affirmative action when it comes to their music consumption. There
is a blinkered parochialism and sluggish conservatism to indie rock taste whose
net result ends up looking an awful lot like self-segregation. One of the dirty
secrets of the UK music press was the fact that sales figures and market
research both showed that issues featuring black artists on the cover sold
poorly. The charitable interpretation of this is that the regular readership
assumed that these were performers in hip hop or R&B, i.e. genres they
either had no curiosity about or actively despised.

During much of the period covered by The
Brit Box, I worked at Melody
Maker, as a staff writer and later as a freelance contributor. I
witnessed the rise of most of the bands featured herein, watched them progress
from live review buzzes to Singles of the Week, from one page features to cover
stories. More often than not, though, I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
With a handful exceptions--the epoch-defining Smiths and Stone Roses, the
dizzyingly innovative My Bloody Valentine, the witty, charismatic Pulp, a few
others-- my attention was focused on all the other stuff going on during this
period: UK rock’s experimental fringe, hip hop, dance culture and electronic
music. When it came to guitars, I found the stuff coming out of America far
more appealing, on the whole: wilder-sounding, better played, often coupled
with a deranged and scabrous sense of humor. For my contingent at Melody Maker, the rock bands
that really mattered were mostly from the States: Husker Du, Big Black, Sonic
Youth, Dinosaur Jnr, Butthole Surfers, Pixies, Mercury Rev, Royal Trux…. Indeed
in our crowd, it became a fashionable attitude to be ashamed of the homegrown
indie for its sonic feebleness and for being hidebound by self-consciousness.
Ironically (given our profession) we blamed this on the malign influence of the
music press itself, which tended to favour bands that were hot on manifesto and
rhetoric, because it made for a good story and an easy life for the journalist.
For some reason, in those days I believed that American bands were more
intuitive and less contrived--an idea that now seems absurd (what could be more
arty and thought-out-in-advance than Sonic Youth, more irony-clad than
Pavement?). Nonetheless there was a palpable difference in quality and
substance between American and British rock, audible on the basic level of
rocking, something which few UK guitar bands seemed able to pull off during the
Eighties. (Things improved somewhat in the 90s thanks to the rock refresher
course that was grunge. But only very slightly).

That’s one reason why the bands corralled on The
Brit Box stumbled when they reached the shores of America. Time and
again, bands used to playing in huge venues to fervent, pre-converted crowds
would arrive to face the humiliation of starting all over again from near the
bottom: small clubs and audiences with a high proportion of skeptics waiting to
see if the group could deliver live. Having risen so effortlessly in their
homeland, the English groups would flinch from the prospect of slogging around
the United States, putting in the work required to make it here. As time went
by and the failure stories accumulated, their attempts to break America grew
ever more desultory.

There was a sound reason for not making a serious bid to conquer the American
market, though. Being abroad for long stints entailed neglecting their fanbase.
In the high turnover, hothouse atmosphere of the UK scene, out of sight means
out of mind; hungry new pretenders are always coming through to seize the
throne. British music fans and British music papers love the idea of the local:
fans want bands they can go and see regularly, groups they can root for and
support almost like a soccer team. What the music press readership in the UK
has always wanted is a band that resembles itself, which means it’s got to be
white, male, British. The band also needs to stick to the traditional format of
songs plus electric guitars, and to lyrically offer a slightly heroicised
version of the fanbase’s dreams and fears. If you look at what the readerships of NME and Melody Maker voted for as
Best Band over the last 30 years, each year’s #1 has rarely been an American
group (REM and Nirvana were brief exceptions). It’s been a straight line
running from The Jam, Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen, through The
Smiths, Stone Roses, Oasis and Blur, right up to today’s Franz Ferdinand and
Arctic Monkeys. Not an American accent, black face, or pair of ovaries in the
lot of them. And apart from Oasis and Franz, not a full-blown American success
story among them either.

* * * *
Open The Brit Box and
you’ll find two CD cases containing four discs in total. Each one is designed
to look like an ashtray, with the number of cigarette stubs corresponding to
the disc’s number. (Smoking seems to be a crucial element of Britpop’s
semiotics, from Oasis’s “Cigarettes and Alchohol” to Arctic Monkeys’s debut
album with its cover photo of a lad smoking a “fag” down to its nub and the
disc’s image of an ashtray choked with stubbed-out butts). The phone box theme
of fusty English charm resumes on the CD inserts, which depict baked beans,
licorice allsorts, used teabags and a Beefeater Doll.

Pop Disc One into the CD-player and what soon becomes apparent is how, circa
1984,
British indie rock averted its face from the pop present and looked to the
Sixties. Alongside The Smiths, the prime instigators of this drastic shift were
The Jesus and Mary Chain. By the time of 1987’s “April Skies,” Jim Reid and his
brother William had removed their trademark wall-of-noise (as heard on classic
1985 singles like “Upside Down” and “Never Understand”) to reveal classically
contoured songs constructed in homage to a canon of renegade rock: The Stones,
the Stooges, The Velvets, The Beach Boys. Stripping away their sole claim to
radicalism, that blistering sandstorm of feedback, left them exposed as
pasticheurs.

Starting out at roughly the same time as J&MC but slower to achieve renown,
Spacemen 3 engaged in a similar retreat to rock’s archives. Their “Walkin’ With
Jesus” is little more than a guided tour of their record collection (more or
less identical to the Reid Bros, but with some MC5 and gospel added to the
mix). Spacemen 3 consciously saw their music as a gesture of defiance against
the Eighties. In the box set’s booklet, the band’s Jason Pierce (later to break
away to form the more expansive outfit Spiritualized) declares: “we sat the
‘80s out, really. We weren’t in tune with what was going on musically or
politically at all…. We mined a world of music that wasn’t mainstream--taking
from ‘50s and ‘60s music--then just sat on it and made it our own.”

Spacemen 3’s mission statement was “taking drugs to make music to take drugs
to”. But on a popular level, the true chemical-generation revolution in late
Eighties Britain didn’t take the form of Detroit 1969 revivalism. It was rave
culture, fueled by Ecstasy and soundtracked by the alien electronic tonalities
and machine beats of house and techno, a music movement oriented around
looking-to-the-Nineties futurism rather than pining-for-the-Sixties nostalgia.
Some of the J&MC and Spacemen’s 3 fellow-travelers in retro realized this
and tried to board the rave train. The Stone Roses already had one of the few
really groovy British drummers around in Reni, something audible in the
spring-heeled bounce of the otherwise Sixties-sounding “She Bangs The Drum”
(their contribution to The Brit
Box). But as their hometown Manchester became the North of
England’s dance mecca, the Roses made a concerted attempt to assimilate house
music’s hypno-feel with their biggest hit “Fool’s Gold”. Happy Mondays, also
from “Madchester”, had started out resembling a funked-up Velvet Underground
(John Cale produced their debut album), then hooked up with UK house producers
for songs like the box set’s “Step On”. But their lumpen groove generally
sounded more club-footed than club-friendly. On “Only One I Know”, The
Charlatans’s drummer imitates a looped breakbeat, but their milky Hammond organ
sound leaves them stuck in the Sixties. Just about the funkiest track on all
four discs of The Brit Box
is “Loaded” by Primal Scream, the group fronted and led by Jesus and Mary
Chain’s drummer Bobby Gillespie. But that’s because it’s a sampled and
beat-looped remix of another Primal Scream song, with deejay-producer Andy
Weatherall transforming what was originally a bluesy ballad into something like
a house music update of “Sympathy for the Devil.”.

“Swing” and “feel” are in short supply across all four discs of The Brit Box. This rhythmic
deficiency is partly due to the lingering influence of punk, which made
virtuosity nothing to aspire to--or something to conceal, if you already had
it. British rock once boasted many of the finest drummers in the world--Keith
Moon, John Bonham, Charlie Watts, Ringo Starr, Mitch Mitchell from the
Experience, Ginger Baker, Bill Ward, Bill Bruford…. the list goes on. But it’s
hard to imagine anyone but diehard fans being able to even name the drummers in the vast
majority of bands on The Brit
Box. Likewise, if you took the songs and stripped away the other
instrumentation, you’d be unable to identify these tunes from their beats,
something you can actually do with many songs by The Stones or Led Zeppelin.
Rarely contributing anything to the music beyond marking time, the drummers
mostly seem to be there because that’s what rock bands are supposed to have. In Britain,
this most crucial of functions in any band has become the profession of
plodders, people who want to be in a rock group for the lifestyle, not because
they have musical instincts. Anybody in Britain who really cares about beats
and has a feel for the construction of that commonplace miracle, a groove, has
long since gone to work in dance music or hip hop.

In the absence of rhythmic verve and invention, Britpop’s saving grace is
melody. Perhaps the traditions of Tin Pan Alley, music hall and light musics of
all sorts have always been stronger in the United Kingdom. After all, we got
rhythm second-hand, as an American import, starting with jazz. Rock’n’roll and
rhythm-and-blues impacted the UK so hard in the Fifties and Sixties that the
result was a perfect balance between beat and song. But with some of the lesser
output of Sixties England--all those Merseybeat groups like Freddie & The Dreamers,
bands like Herman’s Hermits and the Hollies--you can hear a native proclivity
for over-melodiousness, the musical equivalent to the national sweet tooth. You
can hear the same weakness--an eager-to-please mellifluousness of tone and
tune--in a lot of the Britpop on this box.

That said, there are melodic jewels scattered across these four discs, like The
La’s “There She Goes” (so blatantly a love song to heroin it’s amazing they got
away it), or “Here’s Where The Story Ends” by The Sundays, whose singer Harriet
Wheeler fused Morrissey’s plaintiveness with enraptured grace of Liz Frazer of
the Cocteau Twins. Frazer appears twice in succession on the first disc, first
with the Cocteaus’s slightly frou-frou “Lorelei”, and then as the backing
vocalist on Felt’s “Primitive Painters”. Her cosmic powerhouse of a voice
compensates for the one-note-range of Felt frontman Lawrence, lending majesty
to his passive-aggressive anthem of defiant apathy--"I wish my life could
be as strange/As a conspiracy/I hold out hope but there's no way/To be what I
wanna be"--and transforming his “trail of disgrace” into a heroic refusal.

Lawrence’s “defeatist attitude” was an advance glimpse of the next phase of UK
guitarpop, the shoegaze scene, which was essentially the South of England’s
riposte to the Manchester indie-dance sound. The term “shoegazer” originated
from these bands’s immobility and withdrawn aura onstage, the way they hid
behind their long hair. Guitarists, especially, seemed to spend the whole gig
staring at the floor. There was a prosaic reason for this: the billowing
amorphousness of shoegaze’s guitar sound relied heavily on foot-controlled
pedal effects. But the shoegaze bands’ seeming inability to meet their
audience’s gaze captured the essence of this neo-psychedelic genre, which
involved escaping from a troubled world into a narcoleptic dream-state.
(Dreampop, in fact, was another contender for the genre’s name).

The sound was pioneered by My Bloody Valentine (who only last month announced
their return to activity after 15 years hibernation), and their string of
classic EPs and two masterpiece albums Isn’t
Anything (1988) and Loveless
(1991) dwarfed the efforts of their progeny. But the most successful shoegaze
band was Ride, regular visitors to the UK Top 20 who prospered seemingly for
their very mediocrity. Where MBV’s “Only Shallow” (included here) actively
engulfs you in its swoon, Ride’s “Vapourtrail” casts a pall of lethargy with
its grey-haze guitar and vocal performance closer to a sustained sigh than
singing.

I enjoyed shoegaze quite a bit at the time, especially early tracks by Slowdive
(not included here) and Moose (present with their country-influenced later
style, in the form of “This River Never Will Run Dry”). But fifteen years on,
listening to this stuff again felt less like bliss-out and more like being lost
in a listless mist. Rather than dreampop, Lush’s “For Love” resembles a song
the band dreamed but could only faintly recall upon waking: bass inaudible,
drums soft as snowflakes, voice partially erased, guitars like a watercolor
with too much water in it. Bleach, similarly,
sound bleached--bleached bland. The anemia deepens with the sickly
Chapterhouse, the nondescript Catherine Wheel, the perfectly formulaic Curve.
Around this time grunge happened and a comparison between the two genres is
instructive. The roots were similar (blizzard-guitar groups like Husker Du and
Dinosaur Jnr) but grunge’s roar of rage and cathartic release is much punkier
and energized than shoegaze. “Anemia” is all too apt: there’s a haemorrhaging
away of will and agency in this music. Hardly forceful presences to begin with,
shoegaze vocalists were further subsumed by the genre’s standard production
style, which buried their beneath the layered guitars (typically fast-strummed
and fed through effects so they swirled in the listener’s face like a wind-born
flurry of snowflakes).

From the band’s attempt to overwhelm the audience live with a deluging density
of sound to the songs’s Romantic imagery of ravishment and rapture, shoegaze
was based in an aesthetic of surrender. Its dream-your-life-away resignation
mapped neatly onto the political situation, the long era of Conservative rule
in Britain, a period when the Labour Party seemed unelectable and the Tories, under
Thatcher and Major, pursued youth-unfriendly policies: phasing out grants to
university students, introducing the council tax (an unpopular form of local
taxation that shifted the burden from property owners to young renters--unless
they wanted to drop off the electoral roll, which meant they’d
literally become disenfranchised youth). There’s a curious aptness too the way
that so many young people during the Eighties and early Nineties went into a
kind of cultural exile by hiding in “the Sixties” (the music of Byrds, Velvets,
et al) just as Thatcher and her allies were steadily abolishing the gains of
that decade.

The shoegaze sound was going nowhere (the title of one of Ride’s albums, as it
happens) and soon the UK scene snapped out of the dream-haze with a concerted
move towards punchy tunes, clarity of production, and singers who reveled in
the spotlight. First came the punk recyclers (amphetamine-gobblers These Animal
Men, protest poets The Manic Street Preachers). Next up was the glam redux of
Suede, massive for a couple of years and deservingly so, although “Metal
Mickey,” their offering here, is one of their flimsier singles. All this was
just preparing the way for Oasis, though. When “Live Forever” rips out the
speakers half-way through Disc Three, you can see why they had such an
instantly massive impact: what a relief to hear a voice that snarls, that takes
the tune by the scruff of its neck. Oasis understood rock as a matter of
attitude and vocal timbre (Liam Gallagher’s blend of Lennon’s insolence with
the insouciance of Stone Roses singer Ian Brown) combined with guitar sound
(brother Noel’s distorted tone, gnarly enough to sound classically rock but
stopping well short of shoegazey miasma). The idea of rock as a rhythmically
dynamic music was simply forgotten. Oasis’s no-mark drummer never did much more
than trundle unobstrusively beneath the singalong; Liam’s voice dominated the
mix.

The British scene let out a massive sigh of relief: after the half-measures of
shoegaze (its ineffectual mix of almost-pop and semi-experimentalism, expressed
through an obsession with guitar textures), Oasis had redirected indie rock
back to the eternal verities of songs. Thrilling as “Live Forever” and the
group’s five or six other killer tunes are, though, one shouldn’t lose sight of
the Gallagher Bros as culture criminals, the guys who nearly killed for good
the idea of rock as a genre that was forward-looking and experimental. (That
notion made a slight recovery with Radiohead, a band who the Gallaghers, revealingly,
find an almost personal affront, and who are oddly absent from The Brit Box). Oasis paved
the way for a grim phase of UK pop dominated by what some wag nicknamed
“Dadrock”--bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Cast, Kula Shaker, Dodgy. It was
Dadrock because it could be (and was) enjoyed equally by kids in their teens
and twenties and by their parents (teens or twentysomethings back in the
Sixties, whence these groups derived all their ideas). Kula Shaker even brought
back 1967-style Eastern spirituality with their execrable hit “Tattva”.

When you compared Britpop with its Sixties source, though, what was striking
was how plain and uninspired the substance of its sound was. Britrockers in the
Sixties uniformly strove to grow and develop, both as artists and
instrumentalists. Amid the sustained adequacy of the playing on Disc Three and
Disc Four, it’s a shock when genuine ability and flair leaps out of the
speakers in the form of “The Riverboat Song” by Ocean Colour Scene. The groove
is supple and agile; the singer has the rich white-blues timbre of Procol
Harum’s Gary Brooker or Traffic’s Stevie Winwood. Too bad “Riverboat Song”
sounds like it actually arrived straight from 1968in a time capsule.

There are diamonds in the dungheap: “Stutter”, Elastica’s own time capsule,
from 1978, the year of Buzzcocks and Wire; Supergrass’s T-Rexy youth anthem
“Alright”, the Roxy-gone-shabby tumult of Pulp’s “Common People”. The prime
period Britpop of 1994-96 also captures the optimism and confidence of that
moment when everyone in Britain sensed that the Conservatives were going to get
kicked out by Tony Blair’s New Labour at the next general election. Blair
courted the leading Britpop bands both before and after that May 1997 victory,
making the revitalized UK pop scene a central part of his “Cool Britannia” push
to rebrand the nation as modern and vibrant. He praised Alan McGee of Creation,
Oasis’ record label, as a shining example of New Labour-style
entrepreneurialism and famously invited McGee and Noel Gallagher to a reception
at 10 Downing Street (the singer of Oasis’ great rivals Blur, Damon Albarn, was
also invited but declined to attend). “Cool Britannia” was a replay of the
Sixties “London Swings” scenario, with Oasis as the Beatles to Blair’s Harold
Wilson (the last actually popular Labour PM). Egos inflated by their importance
in the scheme of things (and by vast quantities of cocaine) Oasis then made the
bloated Be Here Now,
whose lead single--“D’you Know What I Mean”--attempted to capture the
weightiness of the historical moment with its incoherent chorus “all my people
right here right now/you know what I mean.”

There were much more interesting things going on in the UK during this period,
which The Brit Box acknowledges
with tracks from Saint Etienne, Stereolab and Cornershop. Saint Etienne present
a far more attractive version of pop Englishness than the rehashed
Kinks/Beatles/Jam of most Britpop. In their hands, this was a national identity
open to outside influences: house music from Chicago and Rimini; soft ‘lover’s
rock’ reggae from Kingston by way of Brixton; French pop of the 60s. Even the
group’s name came from a French soccer team. A similar cool, esoteric mix
informed Stereolab’s music, but unlike the sampler-and-sequencer wielding Saint
Etienne, this South London group stuck with guitars, bass, drums, and
keyboards. Unlike Saint Etienne, they also had an actual French singer, the
dulcet-toned Laetitia Sadier, as opposed to a collection of Françoise Hardy
singles. Sourced in the trance-inducing pulse rhythms of Krautrock outfits like
Kraftwerk and Neu!, Stereolab’s songs came with incongruously non-lulling
lyrics. On “Wow and Flutter” (included here) Sadier coos of capitalism, “it’s
not imperishable, it’s not eternal/Oh yes it will fall”. Cornershop were
another politically aware bunch of smartypants, whose line-up includes two of
the handful of non-white musicians on The
Brit Box, in the form of the Asian British brothers Tjinder and
Avtar Singh. The band are represented here by “Brimful of Asha,” an oblique
paean to Bollywood singer Asha Bosle. But the compilers opted for the late
period Velvet Underground shimmy of the original rather than the boisterous
dance remix by Fatboy Slim, which actually reached #1 in the UK charts.

These groups are exceptions to the post-Oasis rule. As we enter the last three
years of the Nineties with disc Four, it seems like every band is competing for
the attention of buskers across the land. The musical backing is just that… a
mere backdrop for the voices, which are clear, soaring, often in high register
and prominently exposed in a mix that kicks everything else out of the
spotlight. One reason for this is that for indie rock fans on both sides of the
Atlantic, the raison d’etre of the genre is clever words. You can, of course,
find them all over the place in pop, not least in hip hop. In indie, though,
“clever” often seems to equate with arch turns of phrases or droll allusions to
popular culture. Hence the X Files-referencing love song “Sculder and Mully” by
Catatonia, a Welsh band whose 1998 album International Velvet (ha, another pop
culture reference) went triple platinum in the UK. Catatonia singer Cerys
Matthews was once unkindly but indelibly and accurately described as sounding
like "a chicken laying an egg." by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy,
whose own droller-than-thou Brit Box contribution, “Something For the Weekend”
was inspired by the face of actress Kate Beckinsale.

Flourishes of “wit” such as these were scant compensation for Britpop’s sheer
mundanity of sound as the decade’s end approached. Ash, Sleeper, Bluetones,
Hurricane #1, Rialto, Gay Dad… there’s a reason you’ve never heard of these
bands. For reasons unclear, The
Brit Box stops short of venturing into the new millennium, when
things simultaneously got even worse and improved slightly. On the down side,
there was a post-Radiohead shower of mild misery, bands like Coldplay,
Razorlight, Starsailor. But there was also a new crop of spiky vigour in the
form of Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, Art Brut, Bloc Party,
The Klaxons, groups who drew on sharper influences from the postpunk and New
Wave era. Fans of well-honed, observational words and lyrical intellect didn’t
need to deny themselves fully-contemporary beats either, thanks to a new breed
of British singer-rappers like Mike Skinner of The Streets, Lily Allen, Hot
Chip, and Lady Sovereign. Influenced by the rhythms and vocal stylings of ska,
reggae, lover’s rock and dancehall, these performers showed how fertile and
enduring the contribution of Jamaican music has been to British pop across the
decades.

Racists in Britain used to chant “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”.
Draping themselves in the flag, Britpop artists inadvertently sealed themselves
off from the invigorating stream of new ideas coming from black music in the
Eighties and Nineties, a good proportion of them spawned on Britpop’s own
doorstep--sounds like jungle and 2step. Cultivating their quintessential
quaintness, clinging tightly to a glorious and storied past, the British groups
protected their appeal to patriots at home and Anglophiles abroad. But in the
process they lost the world.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit director's cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999; short remix appeared in Springerin, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Smack
in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less
picturesque Bath--genteel, sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece
Theater sort of way. But the town has darker undercurrents: Aleister
Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious
entity called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Now in its third year of
existence, CCRU's institutional status is, to say the least, disputed.
Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office on The
Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the
Philosophy Department of Warwick University a few miles away, as was the
case the last academic year.

Since my knowledge of
CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output--the journal Abstract
Culture--plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea
what I'll encounter after pressing the button marked 'Central
Computer'. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I find three
women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look
reassuringly normal. The walls, though, are covered with peculiar
diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and bizareness of the
unit's research.

But before I can enquire further,
I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghettoblasters. CCRU have
prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their
Virotechnics conference in October 1997. The first cassette-player
issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an incantation or spell.
From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a
female American voice--not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full
of imagery of "swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The
third ghettoblaster emits what could either be Stockhausen-style
electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of
the insect world. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been
synthetically processed, with all the vowels removed to leave just
consonants and fricatives.

Even without the
back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the
piece is an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming
for--an ultra-vivid amalgam of text, sound, and visuals designed to
"libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. CCRU
try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Their
"theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms, delirious with dystopian
cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of
ideas per sentence. Bearing the same distillate relation to its sources
(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio,William Gibson)
that crack does to cocaine, CCRU-text offers an almighty theory-rush.

What
CCRU are striving to achieve is a kind of nomadic thought that--to use
the Deleuzian term-- "deterritorializes" itself every which way: theory
melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences
(neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and
complexity theory, connectionism). It's a project of monstrous
ambition. And that's before you take into account the the most daring
deterritorialisation of all--crossing the thin line between reason and
unreason. But as they say, later for that.

Founded in the 1960s, Warwick rapidly became the epitome of a modern university.
Through
the early to mid Seventies, the university was rife with militancy--not
just student unrest, but discontent amongst the staff (70 percent of
whom at one point gave a vote of no confidence in the Vice Chancellor).
Socialist historian E.P.Thompson was a "thorn in the side of the
adminstiration", recalls one Warwick veteran, and eventually left
because he wasn't given the Labour History Unit he was promised. At the
same time, Warwick was ahead of its time in terms of seeking corporate
funding, such that by the mid-Eighties Margaret Thatcher could describe
it as her favourite university. "Warwick University Inc." (as E.P.
Thompson titled a book) is financially buoyant compared with other
British universities, and well prepared for any future withdrawal of
government funding that may be up the current Labour administration's
sleeve.

Warwick also has a very modern Philosophy
Department. It is Britain's largest graduate school in philosophy
outside Oxford, with about 120 postgraduate and masters students, and a
similar number of undergraduates. The majority are lured by the
department's reputation as the country's leading center for Continental
Philosophy. Events like the October 1997 "DeleuzeGuattari and Matter"
seminar and "Going Australian", a February 1988 conference devoted to
the new school of Australian feminist philosophy, indicate the kind of
work going on at Warwick. It is to this cutting edge Philosophy
Department to which CCRU was linked in a fatally ambigous fashion.

In
a typically gnomic e-mail, CCRU outlined its history. "Ccru
retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie
Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. ...Ccru
feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) +
independent researchers +.... At degree-O Ccru is the name of a door in
the Warwick University Philosphy Department. Here it is now officially
said that Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist'. " CCRU sees
itself as the academic equivalent of Kurtz, the general in Apocalypse
Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results than the
tradition-bound US military. CCRU claim that its frenzied
interdisciplinary activity embarrassed the Philosphy Dept, resulting in
the termination of the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared "up river" into
the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their
operational base above the Body Shop.

"There is no
conspiracy, it's so pedestrian," insists Professor Andrew Benjamin,
Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick's Philosophy Department.
Benjamin is a well-respected post-structuralist scholar with numerous
books to his name. As editor of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy (the
best-selling Continental Philosophy series in the English language),
he's responsible for anthologies like The Difference Engineer: Deleuze
& Philosophy Audibly beaming with pride, the Australia-born
Benjamin talks up Warwick as "an incredibly fabulous philosphy dept
where Deleuzians lie down with Derrideans, and even lie down with
analytic philosphers. Basically, there isn't any postmodern crap done
here, it's quite rigorous stuff."

According to
Benjamin, CCRU was originally set up for Dr Sadie Plant, freshly
recruited from Birmingham University to be a Research Fellow attached to
Warwick's Faculty of Social Science. But the unit--organised around her
interests in cyber-theory and involving a number of postgraduate
students she'd brought over from Birmingham--was initially tied to the
Philosophy Department, owing to Plant's particular interests, like
Deleuze & Guattari. The plan was for the unit to become an
independent, freestanding entity, with the postgrads registered as CCRU
rather than philosophy students. But Dr Plant unexpectedly quit her job
March 1997, before the paperwork was completed. The university decided
to wind CCRU down, with Plant's main ally at Warwick, Nick Land, taking
over her role as Director for the unit's final year of official
existence.

But when Benjamin elaborates on the
procedural intricacies, it's easy to empathise with CCRU's paranoia.
"See, there isn't such a thing as the CCRU," he insists. "Within the
university system you can set up a thing called a center for research,
then you take the planned center to various committees and put it
through this system in whose terms that center would be legitimised,
have an external committee overseeing standards, et cetera. Because
Sadie left early, that procedure didn't happen. Officially, you would
then have to say that CCRU didn't ever exist. There is, however, an
office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with CCRU on the door,
there's a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that
extent, it it is a thriving entity. Informally, it did exist, still
does, lots of things go on under its aegis. But that office will
disappear at the end of the year. A number of students thought there
was a conspiracy, there's a lot of gossip and carry-on, but the fact
is--had Sadie decided to pursue an academic career, CCRU would have been
a viable, ongoing entity."

Thin as rake in her brown
leather jacket, dragging on a Camel Light, Sadie Plant looks every bit
the cyberpunkette. Currently, she's the most famous "media academic" in
Britain--writing for quality newspapers, pontificating on the famous BBC
Radio programme "Start The Week" (a sort of highbrow Howard Stern)
alongside Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. Plant's elevation to intellectual
celebrity status began well before the late 1997 publication of her
acclaimed Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. Although
she's far from happy with the marketing of Zeros as a Nineties
cyberfeminist equivalent to The Female Eunuch, there are striking
parallels between Plant and Germaine Greer (who taught at Warwick's
English department before quitting to write Eunuch). "When I went to see
the Vice Chancellor about leaving, he said 'I don't believe it,
Germaine Greer pulled this on us as well'", says Plant, flashing her
buck-toothed smile.

We're in a cafe in Birmingham, the
industrial Midlands metroplis where Plant grew up and where she
returned after quitting Warwick.The way Sadie tells it, she never really
wanted to be an academic in the first place, but just fell into a
university career. After transforming her Manchester University
philosophy PhD on Situationism into The Most Radical Gesture: The
Situationist International In A Postmodern Age, Plant accepted a
Lecturer's position at Birmingham University's Department of Cultural
Studies. Back in the Seventies, when it was called Centre For
Contemporary Cultural Studies, the department was a vibrant place, home
of the "resistance through rituals" school of neo-Gramscian subcultural
theory (Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, et al). But the CCCS
spirit was long gone by the time Plant arrived. The only redeeming
aspect was the undergraduate and graduate students, who shared Plant's
enthusiasm for rave culture and digital technology.

Plant
was on the verge of quitting academia for good, when the opportunity of
a Research Fellowship at Warwick presented itself in 1995. Warwick was
already a cyber-theory hotbed, what with its 1994 and '95 Virtual
Futures conferences. There were strong alliances between like-minds at
Birmingham and Warwick: the VF events had involved some of Plant's
Birmingham proteges (who appeared at VF95 in their proto-CCRU
incarnation Switch), while Plant and Nick Land had actually been
creative-and-sexual partners for a couple of years and remained close.
With the promise of her very own research center dangled before her,
Plant decided to give academia one last shot, and brought many of her
Birmingham students with her to form CCRU.

For the
first year of its existence, 1995/1996, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
was characterised by "a frantic atmosphere" of interdisciplinary
excitement, involving reading groups, lectures series, research-sharing
sessions, seminars like 1996's Afro-Futures, and the confrontational
journal ****Collapse. There was an exhilirating sense of being at the
heart of something new. This first phase of the unit's life climaxed
with Virtual Futures 96: Datableed, which was wholly organised by the
CCRU (the first two VF's had been put together by postgraduates
attached to Professor Benjamin's Centre for Research in Philosophy and
Literature). Advertised as "an antidisciplinary event" aiming "to
explore the smearing of previously discrete cultural spheres", VF96
alternated DJ sessions with sound-and-vision enhanced talks by a diverse
range of guests--theorist Manuel De Landa, journalists Steve Beard and
Mark Sinker, SF writer Pat Cadigan, and cyberfeminist Linda Dement, to
name just a handful.

By the second year of its
existence, tensions emerged between the CCRU-virus and its host, the
Philosophy Department. Warwick had expected something closer to
traditional notions of cyberculture: Internet studies, basically. But
what actually took shape reflected Plant and Land's interest in hooking
up cybernetics in the original Norbert Wiener sense (information flows,
dissolving the difference between living and non-living systems) to
compatible elements of Deleuze & Guattari (schizo-analysis,
machinic desire, the biomechanical continuum of material reality), plus
chaos, complexity and connection theory. "Cyber", as CCRU conceived it,
also connoted "cyberpunk": the theory-fiction goal of academic writing
that rivalled the hallucinatory rush you got from Neuromancer and Blade
Runner.

Warwick clearly got more than it bargained
for. Benjamin admits to having "mixed feelings about what Sadie and Nick
do", professes to be mystified by "the meaningless term" that is
cyber-theory, and keenly stresses the fact that CCRU and the Philosophy
Department "are quite separate things". One of Benjamin's administrative
colleagues notes drily that "very little" CCRU work "was published in
philosophy journals." For her part, Sadie Plant emphasises the
practical problems caused by the CCRU students' interdisciplinary
approach, like "the need for external examiners.... It would have suited
us to be able to just sweep all that away, but it's not so easy."

CCRU
are less diplomatic, railing against "disciplinary templates" that
obstruct "real research". "You're not allowed to follow these things
where they want to go," says Mark Fisher, a cleancut young man who
speaks with an evangelical urgency and agitated hand gestures. "You're
not allowed to find anything out.... Because who would mark it?!". He
cites the example of the PhD work of CCRU's Suzanne Livingston, which
was challenged by one Philosophy Department member on the
grounds--"what's neurology got to do with capitalism?".

After
Plant left, CCRU embarked upon a second phase of trying "to occupy the
university" and create a "non-disciplinary" atmosphere by forging links
with postgraduates in the Mathematics and Science departments. But this
petered out "with no real engagement". The final breaking point came
with the Fall '97 Virotechnics conference, which CCRU decided to hold
off campus at a media conference center in Wolverhampton, 35 miles from
Warwick. According to CCRU, Nick Land effectively had to resign his
lecturer's job in order to attend Virotechnics. "Nick had to cancel a
simultaneously scheduled seminar at the university, hastily set up as an
opportunity for him to explain the increasingly perplexing direction of
CCRU's research", explains CCRU's Steve Goodman. Every couple of
years, the staff of university departments make an assessment of the
publications the department has produced. Since the kind of work Land
and his proteges were producing was not considered philosophy, and
therefore not counted in any departmental assessment, Land felt obliged
to resign, effective the end of the academic year.

Virotechnics
was the culmination of the unit's second-phase attempt "to rigorise a
kind of diagrammatic study programme in the university," says Land,
referring to CCRU's alloy of science and philosphy. "That was really not
acceptable, it's fair to say, to the Philosophy Department. So the
third phase is take that programme outside the university." While CCRU
members continue to finish their PhD's and teach, they regard these
activities as " lower-order intensity"; the real action takes place at
the Leamington HQ. "There's nothing more unproductive than engaging in
this lifelong struggle to get intensity into the academy," says an
exasperated Fisher. "It's hopeless and thankless." He maintains that
the Philosophy Dept's attitude to CCRU ranges from "outright hostile" to
"embarassment", but the general strategy "is to wait for it to die
rather than to actively kill it."

Nick Land is the
kind of "vortical machine" (to use a fave CCRU trope) around which swirl
all manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories. Didya hear
about the phase Nick went through only talking in numbers? Or the time
he was taken over by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no
deying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr Land has
been a "strange attractor" luring students to Warwick purely through
his personal reputation. A colleague who sat in on Land classes in the
early Nineties remembers both his "impressive pedagogic commitment" and
his charisma. "Despite his diffident, tentative way of suggesting
things, Nick had a real presence.... It was conspicuous that his gang of
groupies did fall apart during his sabbatical term."

The
Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's
sole book-length publication to date, is a remarkable if deranged mix
of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the
implications of Bataille's thought (if taken seriously, comparable to
"syphilis of the mind"). Prefiguring CCRU's struggles with university
bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic bile, occasionally
spilling over into flagellating self-disgust. Philosophy itself is
castigated as "the excruciation of libido". Thirst For Annihilation's
polymathically perverse range of learning (thermodynamics, cyclone
formation, the Menger sponge), and phrases like "vortex of vulvo-cosmic
dissolution" that blend scientific language with darkside mysticism,
anticipate the CCRU's work.

In the early Nineties,
Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial
engineering", recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious
phase in which he offered millenial prophecies for the next global
meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It
rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."

As
much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly
versed in the gamult of occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I
Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force),
Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the
eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for
plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT). Much of CCRU's
thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science and
superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)

After
reading Thirst For Annihilation's valedictory salute to "the saints,
shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed,",
and his self-description in ***Collapse as "a palsied mantis
constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking
the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all
humanism", I expected Land to be an emaciated and eldritch figure.
Stick insect thin, he is. But Land's gentle voice and impishly twinkling
eyes make him closer to a playgroup leader than a dark magus. He and
the CCRU crew ply me with endless cups of tea while explaining the
curious diagrams on the walls.

There's a chart that
synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related
to a magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or
invoking, you're setting up a magical event that will be cut across
from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will happen,"
explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of
"deep time" as outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned
World--depicts a cross section of the human spine, with different
vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a
chart that divides human history into a series of periods--"the
primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" --culminating in a
post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity
or polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.

The
most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the
occult numerological techniques of digital reduction and triangular
numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that descends from 9 to
one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its
implications to me at considerable length (something to do with allowing
them to understand "concepts as number systems) it becomes clear they
sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of the
universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the
end-product of CCRU's determination to abandon "the fuzziness of
discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a much crisper,
more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp
and rigorous" is one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it
puts on his weak 'R').

The diagram was a gift from
"Professor Barker". Inspired by Professor Challenger--the Conan-Doyle
anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in "The Geology of
Morals" section of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia--Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who hips
the CCRU to various cosmic secrets. "But we'd be a bit reluctant to say
'imaginary' now, wouldn't we?," cautions Land with a mischievous glint
in his eye. "We've learned as much--well, vastly more from Professor
Barker --than supposedly 'real' pedagogues!". As CCRU's "avatar",
Barker has revealed the "Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma". Following the
materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture is
analysed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From
the chemistry of metals to the non-linear dynamics of the ocean, from
the cycles of capitalism to the hyper-syncopated breakbeat rhythms of
jungle, the cosmos is an "unfolding traumascape" governed by
self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every
scale.

Libidinising "flows" and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power,
Deleuze
& Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU
develop this element of A Thousand Plateaus into a kind of
mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call "Gothic Materialism"
("ferro-vampiric" cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and
walks the "flatline" between life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about
how "the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood contains iron",
about how the goal is to "hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core,
which is the Body-Without-Organs". Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the
Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialised energy;
Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as "an ethical injunction", a supreme
goal.

^^^^^^^^^^^

O[rphan]
D[frift>] also talk about "metal in the body" and seeking the
B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan]
D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at VF96 and are
staging an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's
Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu
Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students at the
prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about
creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented
around "schizoid thinking", pre-linguistic autistic states and
man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994, OD
was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: "experimentation with drugs
and techno", and a 1993 encounter with Nick Land.

"Before
CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a
while," says Roberts. "We fed him image experience, tactile readings of
the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick
in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful
about having a man you could ring up and ask: 'what's radiation?',
'what's a black hole?'".

OD's collective debut was a
multimedia installation at London's Cabinet Gallery. What began as a
catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book,
Cyberpositive. Like Plant's Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text
of sampled writings that aren't attributed in the text. But where Plant
offers footnotes; OD merely list the "asked" and "un-asked"
contributors at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a
sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe,
placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as
post-structuralist theorists. "We treat Burroughs as clearly as
important a thinker as any notional theorist," says Nick Land, "At the
same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction.
Marx is obviously a science fiction writer." For her part, Sadie Plant
regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as
"more reliable witnesses", precisely because, unlike theorists, "they
don't have an axe to grind".

The most highly-charged
passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing
and Roberts's and Mukherjee's evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD
experience. "I used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked
really pretentious," recalls Roberts. "Tracing what's happening in all
the different sound channels and what they're doing spatially and
physically to you". The language veers from masochistic mortification of
the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the meat is learning to know loss")
to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession ("white
darkness", "the fog of absolute proximity", "psyclone", "beautiful
fear"). "It's trying to process the dissassembling of the self," says
Roberts. "Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting. The
violence of the sounds in techno, it's like you're being turned inside
out, smeared, penetrated."

Despite her facial piercing
and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out,
aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A
half-smile flickering on her lips, as if she's privy to some kosmik
joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter--as though some unutterably alien
zone of posthuman consciousness hasn't quite relinquished its hold.
Which may be a pretty accurate description of the state of play. If
CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot further.
Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they
sem to believe that humanity will soon abandon the "meat" of incarnate
existence and become pure spirit. Throughout Cyberpositive there's the
recurrent exhortation "we must change for the machines"; while the book
ends with the declaration--"human viewpoint redundant."

Not
only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London
HQ contains several cages of snakes--proof of their determination to
get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by
Gibson's Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated
entities equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology).
Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits
with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other
contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches--daintily
quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. "Too
radical for me", I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes light up
triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Cyberpositive"
was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land.
First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon,
"Cyberpositive" was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing
orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term
"cyberpositive" was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of "negative
feedback" (homeostasis), and "positive feedback" (runaway tendencies,
vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized "negative
feedback", Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback--specifically,:
the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilise
control structures.

"It was pretty obvious that a
theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily
but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere," says Plant. "If there was
going to be scope for any kind of....not 'resistance', but any kind of
discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come
from somewhere else." That elsewhere was certain passages in A Thousand
Plateaus where Deleuze & Guattari suggest that, in Plant's
words, "you don't try and slow things down, you encourage them to go
fast as possible. Which was interestingly connected to Marx's ideas
about capitalism sweeping away the past. So we got into this stance of
'oh well, let it sweep away! Maybe it should sweep away faster'." Other
crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of
"capitalism as the system of antimarkets", and, says Plant,
historian-of-everyday-life Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism as
"an amalgam of would-be free market forces and state/
corporate/centralised control functions. So there isn't really any such
thing called 'capitalism', it's just a coincidence of those two really
extreme and opposed tendencies."

Plant and the CCRU
enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organising activity: street
markets, "the frontier zones of capitalism", what De Landa calls
"meshwork", as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds
quite jovial, the way they describe it now--a bustling bazaar culture of
trade and "cutting deals". But "Cyberpositive" actually reads like a
nihilistic paean to the "cyberpathology of markets", celebrating
capitalism as "a viral contagion" and declaring "everything
cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind". In Nick Land solo essays like
"Machinic Desire" and "Meltdown", the tone of morbid glee is
intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and
literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital
and technology, as it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions,
dissolves subjectivities". In "Meltdown", Land declares: "Man is
something for it to overcome: a problem, drag".

This
gloating delight in capital's deterritorialising virulence is the CCRU's
reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought; a
sort of rubbing salt in the wounds (as when Land jibes at the "senile
spectre" of Socialism, an allusion to The Communist Manifesto).
"There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market
ideas and completely schleroticised, institutionalised thought," says
Mark Fisher. "Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious
that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions.
Nothing ever died of contradictions!". Exulting in capitalism's
permanent "crisis mode", CCRU believe in the strategic application of
pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos. The real struggle,
says Fisher in fluent Deleuzian, is within capitalism and between
"homogenisation processes and nomadic distribution.".

What
feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is
really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but "the future coming
together". Where Land gives this idea a millenial spin (he's described
capitalism as "an invasion from the future", a virus retrochronically
triggered by some kind of artificial intelligence to create the
conditions for its own assembling--an idea that reads like it was
spawned by watching Terminator on acid), Plant's attitude is more
humanely ambivalent. In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported
the Coal Miner's strike, a revolt against Thatcherite modernising
policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture.
Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and
anti-welfare policies pursued by the Conservative goverment in the 1980s
really did constitute "a revolution". She talks approvingly of the end
of "the dependency culture", arguing that this helped catalyse the
Nineties upsurge of British pop culture, fashion and art.

"Obviously
it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the
scrapheap of history", Plant says, looking appropriately pained. "But
I've got a far more evolutionary view of history these days. Just as
particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human
cultures". In the face of this "reality", she argues, the British Left
is comparable with the Church of England: "Every so often it comes out
and makes some moral statement about how terrible things are, but
what's it going to do about it? Nothing."

Many
Left-wing theorists would retaliate by arguing that the Plant/Land/CCRU
pro-market stance is merely an intellectual accomodation to "realities"
imposed by top-down corporate forces; that by mapping techniques
appropriate for natural phenonema (chaos theory, non-linear dynamics)
onto capitalism, they've effectively naturalized the free market,
resulting in a kind of post-Deleuzian version of Social Darwinism.
Judith Williamson--Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex
University, and writer for the left-leaning newspaper The
Guardian--accuses the CCRU of "inevitabilism".

"All
these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one
from morality," she says. "Most of capitalism's flows are deeply
pernicious." The trouble with inevitablism is that it removes human
agency from the picture, complains Williamson. "But human will is not
nothing -- there have been these huge acts of courage and altruism
throughout history." As neo-Deleuzians devoutly committed to
impersonality, agency is precisely what Plant and the CCRU demote.
"Nothing takes the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway
tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," argues Plant in
Zeros + Ones. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been
incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo
are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or
hold them back".

Williamson is an old sparring partner with Plant, Land and CCRU, having had
several
public fights with them at various academic events. The author of
Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, Williamson belongs
to an earlier, Marx-influenced phase of British cultural theory, so the
the clash between her and CCRU is partly generational. Recalling a
famous spat in the bar of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she
recalls finding it "spooky that Nick Land and all these people spoke as
one. You could not get 20 of my postgrad students in a room and have
them agree with me. I find that scary--that messianic quality, like
they've got the message"...A lot of what they say reminds me of tripping
experiences, where you have that feeling that everything coheres and
makes sense."

Another Williamson accusation--that CCRU
lift ideas from chaos and complexity that describe material process but
"apply them in a metaphorical way... as if using a concrete thing for a
metaphor makes it not be a metaphor"--would especiallly infuriate CCRU.
Metaphor, figurative language, the whole realm of representation and
ideology: these are the enemy, as far as CCRU are concerned. "Our
analysis is materialist, rather than ideological," says Goodman,
"Whether the scale is geological, oceanic, socio-cultural, there are
parallels going on at every scale". Despite drawing a lot from
post-structuralism's assault upon the sovereign ego, CCRU detest
deconstruction, precisely because of its treatment of the text as a
cosmology and everything as metaphor. "The only thing that's powerful
about books--their ability to plug into other machines outside
themselves-- is completely destroyed by treating them as this
macro-interiority that spreads over everything," spits Fisher, co-author
of the hilarious and coruscating Abstract Culture rant "Pomophobia".

Hungry
for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce
postmodernism's wan fatalism (the idea that we're at the end of
everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left (Fisher talks,
cyborg-style, about the relief of having "the false memory-chip of
Socialist authenticity" removed from his brain). In the process, they've
jettisoned the concept of "alienation" in both its Marxist and Freudian
senses. They speak approvingly of "surplus value", sublimation and
commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where "Cyberpositive" noted
how how runaway capitalism had accessed "inconceivable alienations",
CCRU's collective essay "Swarmachines" goes further and climaxes with
the boast: "alienated and loving it".

The idea, says
Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner--"the
proletariat as this synthetic class, of a revolution that's on the side
of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of 'alienation' depends on
the notion that there's some authentic essence lost through the
development of capitalism. But according to Barker's Geo-Cosmic theory
of trauma, everything's already synthetic." If reality really is a
bio-mechanical continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism's
escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the
creation of artificial desires.

Willamson condes that
"if there's one thing that's quite endearing about CCRU, it's the search
for a kind of optimism.... Today it's very hard to have those sort of
Sixties feelings of 'oh God, things are exciting, things can get
better, new things can happen'". The mania of CCRU's texts--a
mood-blend of euphoric anticipatioin and dystopian dread that Mark Dery
called "dysphoria"--is certainly contagious. "A lot of things are
exciting, but is it true?," cautions Williamson. "Music is a good
parallel--you don't think 'this music explains the universe' just
because you finds it charges you up". Again, the CCRU would fervently
disagree. "The musical model is really key to us," says Land. "It's
absurd to say that music doesn't represent the real and therefore it's
an empty metaphor. Every theorist who hasn't a real place for music ends
up with one-dimensional melancholia."

Not only do the
CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music--specifically, the British
rave genre of jungle a/k/a drum & bass--but popular culture is
where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right from its late Eighties
beginnings, rave culture's motor has been anarcho-capitalist and
entrepreneurial: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses
and fields, to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation by the record
and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge comes from the
grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios,
specialist record stores, pirate radio.

Sadie Plant
attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of dependency
culture, forcing people "to get real and find some ways of surviving"
but also to invent "new forms of collectivity" (the micro-utopian
communality of the rave).

As a postgraduate in
Manchester, Plant was swept up in that city's legendary 1988-90 rave
scene. Currently, she's co-running a jungle club in Birmingham called
Kleptomania, for which she creates back-projections involving "video
feedback", an "orgasmically beautiful" effect that makes "everything
looks like it's come from another world". Plant is also writing about
book about the interface between drugs and technology. CCRU has a
musical sub-component, Ko-Labs, engaged in making jungle tracks. The
unit's latest recruit is Jessica Edwards, a researcher who has no
affiliation with Warwick University whatsoever, but who used to be a
professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate
thesis entitled "Mapping the Liminal- Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum
& Bass".

Despite being rave theorists and
"sub-bass materialists", CCRU are surprisingly cagey when the topic of
drugs is introduced. Acknowledging the cyborgizing, viral usefulness of
drugs--as anorganic elements that enter the nervous system and engineer
precise changes in consciousness--Land nonetheless resists the "relapse
into a biographical narrative". Anna Greenspan talks of the negative
"crash-and-burn" syndrome caused by drug abuse, and says the CCRU are
more interested in building sustained plateaus of intensity. One outcrop
of this is Suzanne Livingston's research into "long term rewiring of
perception"--techniques of flash and flicker that restructure the brain,
as already used by advertising, MTV, and rave promoters (lights,
lazers and strobes).

As well as being galvanised by
music, the CCRU are also influenced by the theory-driven leading edge of
music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun,
contributor to magazines like iD and The Wire and author of the
forthcoming More Brilliant Than The Sun, a study of "sonic fiction" in
black music from Sun Ra to jungle. He was guest of honour at CCRU's
Afro-Futures seminar and gave a talk at VF96. Eshun describes himself
and the CCRU as "concept-engineers", as opposed to thinkers. Critique,
he argues, is a rhetorical mode that puts the heavy burden of History on
your shoulders, whereas the concept-engineer is into speculation. "Most
theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer
uses theory to excite and ignite," Eshun proclaims. Where "thinker"
evokes an effete and impotent ivory-tower detachment, "engineer"
suggests someone who gets down-and-dirty with the material word (in
Deleuzian terms, someone who operates and maintains desiring machines).
Like a DJ or jungle producer, the concept-engineer is "a sample-finder":
s/he's free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory
and simply use the bits that work, in the spirit of Deleuze &
Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit rather than
gospel.

^^^^^^^^^^^

"Concept-engineer"
is a good tag for the outerzone of "independent researchers" and
amateur autodidacts to which CCRU is connected. Renegade theorists like
Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine Break/Flow brilliantly
analyses rave music in terms of "nonconceptual thought" and "impulsional
exchanges", and celebrates the techno underground as a rhizomatic,
insubordinate, post-media economy. And like Matthew Fuller, a media
theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links to
the hacker underground. Fuller's CV of cultural dissidence includes
flypostering, pirate radio, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast
Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of
anarcho-seminars like "Seizing The Media" dedicated to the theory and
praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural:
Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's
"Cyberpositive" and an essay by CCRU member Steve Metcalf.

Discussing
his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling
traditional "modes of political address" and developing a sort of
post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true concept-engineer, he
believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. "Publishers
like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce material that you don't have to
be an academic to get into, so it circulates outside those milieux.
When I give presentations at academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a
more powerful position than the academics--I can steal all the
advantages of their discipline, plus do something else with it that
fucks it up totally."

Noting that Deleuze &
Guattari are already being institutionalised into "the most dreary,
saintly area of discourse", Fuller says he's dedicated to "cracking open
those texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium
and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and
narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the
reader, so to speak. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned
from fiction than theory." Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose
work-in-progress, Writing On Drugs, includes a fictional component.
Plant says she hopes that subsequent books will become "pure fiction".

^^^^^^^^^^^^

"The
most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang -- PhD students
with attitude!," says Eshun. Loathing the "necrotic side of philosphy,
the chewing-over of dead thinkers' entrails", and bored limp by the
"delibidinising" atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic
events, claims Eshun, expressly "in order to disrupt, undermine and
ridicule.... They'd get into pitched battles with Derrideans!".
Enhancing this picture of intra-academic gang-warfare, two of CCRU's
allies from another university once turned up to an event sporting
"colors": they'd printed up T-Shirts that mimicked the logo of Dolce
& Gabbana, but stood for Deleuze & Guattari!

Weary
of such sports, Plant, Land and CCRU have all enthusiastically
embraced the idea of escaping "institutional lockdown" by going
freelance. In addition to her drugs book, Plant is working on a film
screenplay and says she can't imagine ever returning to academia. The
CCRU hope to become a kind of independent think-tank, selling
"commodities" on the intellectual free market--like their strikingly
designed Abstact Culture (each "swarm" consists of five separate
monographs bundled together) and, in the future, CD's, CD-ROM's and
books. "The whole saga of the first phase of the CCRU was to do with
negotiating bureaucratic space," says Fisher. "But we quickly realised
that the institution didn't depend on university space itself , but on
the collectivity."

It seems unlikely, however, that
Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in
the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have
occurred. Plant says she couldn't really go along with the trip into
numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself
"in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used
to!". CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented her premature
departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent emphasis on collectivity
stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to
this harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired
and who they decided to devote three, four years of their lives
around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with being a
guru figure.

"Nick's hermetic, he wants acolytes", says
Eshun. "Whereas Sadie's this total communicator. Zeros + Ones is the
return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can't think of any
other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think
she'll get it. " CCRU, meanwhile, are toying with the idea of
relocating wholesale to India.

For CCRU work, post-CCRU activity, and allied ‘renegade autodidacts’ check out these sites: